Imposter Syndrome as a Collective Experience

Do you doubt your skills, feel like you’re not as good as everyone else or feel like a fraud? Chances are you’ve been told you’re suffering from imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome refers to “persistently feeling like a fraud despite one’s achievements, often with the fear that one will be exposed”. Type imposter syndrome into your search bar and you’ll find no shortage of solutions. Be more assertive. Don’t be such a perfectionist. Fake it ‘till you make it. Be more confident.

I think we need to fix the institutions instead.

Institutional bias is a “tendency for the procedures and practices of particular institutions to operate in ways which result in certain social groups being advantaged or favoured and others being disadvantaged or devalued”. These social groups tend to be women and gender minorities, people of colour, the LGBTQIA+ community, First Nations people, and those with disabilities.

Many feminist, anti-racist, working-class, queer and disability studies scholars have redefined imposter syndrome as “a collective experience happening in relation to specific places, spaces and groups, and intersecting forms of marginalisation”. Instead of focusing on the individual, they look at interactions between institutions and identities.

By challenging the deficit model, which focuses on the individual as the problem, they disrupt the narrative that individualises achievement and deems those who are unable to succeed in these institutions as less capable than their peers.

“The boundaries of institutional belonging are exposed by feeling, and being identified as being, out of place.”

The emotional labour required “to weather feelings of being a fraud despite one’s achievements, in order to survive and thrive in exclusionary spaces” is referred to as ‘imposter work’. Unsurprisingly, it disproportionately falls on people from marginalised communities.

Nevertheless, the labour of ‘overcoming’ imposter syndrome is given to these same communities. But when our institutional and professional ideals are shaped by a patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist understanding of success, what are we actually striving for? Should confidence at any cost really be the goal? What behaviours do we unquestioningly accept when we view this unconditional self-assuredness as the norm?

Or as Nathalie Olah asks, “how many instances of sociopathy have we collectively permitted as a result of this way of thinking?”

The concept of imposter syndrome forces us to confront which traits our institutions value and why. Until we begin to see it as a structural issue, people from marginalised communities will continue to struggle against institutions which were built on our exclusion.

Interested in sharing your experiences?

Although I can't change global power systems and knowledge hierarchies, in Writing for Activism: Opinion Writing Masterclass, we look at why the voices of people like you haven't  historically been valued and what you can do to help change that.

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